Last Thursday at Greenville Rotary, Parker England and Bob Sharman, two good Presbyterians, stood in front of the packed-house lunch crowd to offer their prognostications for the coming college football season.
Parker was very diligent in his report. He used a PowerPoint to catalog the highs and lows of what he ultimately predicted to be a bowl-worthy season for the Mississippi State Bulldogs.
Bob took a different approach.
He borrowed the format of one of the true pioneers of sports radio, Leonard Postero.
Postero created the show Leonard’s Losers in 1958 at an Athens, Georgia, radio station. His delivery was much like Jerry Clower’s in that he doesn’t tell funny stories, he tells stories funny.
Each week, Postero, who called himself Leonard Postoasties, would make predictions about all the SEC games and then fill time with the big games on the rest of the schedule. Instead of picking the winner of each contest, he would, as the title suggests, pick the loser.
Here’s an example from the 1990s: "Phillip Fulmer leads his Rifleman into the Athens Kennel for a shooting match with Jim Donnan's Pack of Drool Dogs. The Volunteer Army has owned the K-9s of late, while the Red Clay Hounds think it's about time to sink their teeth into the Big Orange Rifle Brigade. The Knoxville Army is angry after last week, but the Athens Dawgs will get the job done. Leonard's Loser? Tennessee."
The program, at its height, was aired on 1,400 radio stations. The show usually played on Saturday mornings.
I started listening to the show with my tailgating and travel-game partner Ed back in the mid-1990s. It didn’t matter how late we’d been out the night before or what time the Florida game was to start, we’d be in the truck in the morning listening to Leonard’s Losers every weekend.
It was part of the superstition we’d built around our game-day activities.
Mine included wearing an ill-fitting pair of orange-and-blue, plaid shorts to every game for years until my mom threw them out. Ed had a pair of orange and blue flip flops he wore to the games.
Postero retired in 1999 and a few Athens businessmen bought the show and kept it going for another six years.
The show still lives on in a small way on a website: theleonardslosers.com. Original Leonard’s Losers shows can be found on YouTube.
When Bob took to the lectern at Rotary he went through the list of games and found Leonard’s Losers to be anyone but the Ole Miss Rebels in every single one of them.
The predictions were much to the consternation of the Bulldogs in the crowd, who may, if truth be told, take the idea of picking games in a Rotary club a bit too seriously.
Honestly, if I were to be given the opportunity to predict the entire season for the Florida Gators right now, they’d be just as undefeated as everyone else.
Isn’t that why we are fans?
I don’t want to start the season with four losses penciled in on the schedule.
I want to start the season with unsullied optimism even though in the 116 years the Gators have been playing football, we’ve never gone undefeated.
I don’t want realism. I want to cheer for a team of people I’ve never met coached by a guy I don’t know whose only connection to me is the five years I spent on the campus and the few dollars I’ve sent them over the years.
Perhaps such an outlook comes from being a fan of a team generally on the plus side of the ledger of wins and losses.
There is one thing I know for certain, I don’t ever want to hear Leonard Postoasties tell me the Gators are Leonard’s Losers.
“Get me outta here Percy,” it’s time to go watch the Gators play.
Jon Alverson is proud to be publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. Write to him at jalverson@ddtonline.comor call him at 662-335-1155.
